The cloth with a thousand uses

This one isn't strictly from a hotel room, but since this blog documents bad art I encounter on business trips I've stretched the definition a bit and included it anyway. In fact it's from the BA lounge at Chicago O'Hare's 5th terminal.

Now, is it just me, or has someone framed and mounted a J-Cloth and hung it on a wall?

Excitingly, this one has pencil notes at the bottom indicating that it is no. 29/60 in a limited series. There was another one a yard or so away - it was a blue J-Cloth. Congratulations to 'R. Imodel', then, for a Duchampian feat of dadaism, like the urinal placed in an art gallery, of taking an everyday found (or indeed in this case presumably *bought*) object, and turning it into 'art'.

California Dreamin'

To Long Beach, the port of Los Angeles. LaLa Land is not renowned for its restraint in matters of taste, so I had high hopes of finding something noteworthy here, and I was not disappointed. Here there is a triple whammy in what the receptionist assured me was a *very* recently refurbished room (and I could still smell the paint when I first arrived, before I was able to air the room a bit). This leads me to conclude that I may well have been the first guest to gaze upon this amazing tryptich.

First the art above the desk;

(Emulsion on natural wood, unsigned)

Pretty harmless geometric abstracts, I guess, although not something I'd share house space with. But Long Beach is a port, don't you see - you can see the RMS Queen Mary at her berth from the window of this room, so the designer felt the need to put in a maritime touch, which may explain this:

(Print on wallpaper)

A strange snakelike musing on fishing nets and rope which dominates the bathroom. And it probably also explains the fact that this six foot edifice has been erected over the bed:

(Print on canvas, unsigned)

I like the way that the blue/grey colour scheme is repeated from the bathroom, but a six foot print of stacked ISO containers? I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea. Subliminally it is reminding us that standardisation has robbed our world of its individuality in the name of efficiency, and nowhere is that more true than in the world of hotels. And as hotels, so the world - we are now all just interchangeable shipping containers full of iPhones and sweatshop fabrics. Pleasant dreams, dudes.

I Dream Of Djinni

Our journey takes us to the exotic Persian Gulf, and the oil rich sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi. Islamic art is renowned for its geometric complexity and beauty; the fabulous tiles and carvings of Morocco and the calligraphy of Arabia. On the other hand, it also comes up with giant concrete coffee pots on roundabouts, and, in a hotel on the east side of the island of Abu Dhabi, this...

Oil on canvas, unsigned.

What to make of it? A potato and some rings left by paint cans? Was it a coincidence that this was hung in the toilet? As we regard its unfathomable shallows, we may never know.

Singapore slung

This is from a nice hotel in Singapore, and a nice room. Most of the art in the room was actually quite tasteful, and I didn't mind it at all, but the main living area was dominated by this six foot monstrosity;

(Oil on canvas. Unsigned.)

What is it? I thought letters originally, but the phallic thing bottom centre has the look of a tower with an angled roof on it. The green bits do look a bit like the ever present trees around Singapore. Are these supposed to be city blocks? Horrific.

High Anxiety

After a long absence, the Conference Season is upon us again. I've had some holiday travel, but disappointingly there has been no bad art in the hotels, but now I'm back to business travel, and already we have a corker. I can feel that this will be a good Autumn.

So I'm currently on the 39th floor of a large chain hotel in Frankfurt (no names, no pack drill). Fantastic views when it manages to stop raining, but somehow being so high up there's just that hint of post-9/11 worry that an airliner may be about to make contact with your room. So what better to calm the disquiet of the nervous guest than this:

(Print on canvas, 1m x 1m, unsigned)

Yes, a slightly modernist musing on blazing skyscrapers, one of which  (from the logo) appears to be the nearby Deutsche Bank building. Wunderbar! Is it a comment on the financial inferno that is raging in the Eurozone? A reminder that all of man's proudest achievements are merely worldly vanities which must one day pass away? Or just a 'bankers we hate you' two fingered salute? Either way I think there is perhaps a joke intended here - I'm reminded obliquely of Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals, which were deliberately painted to put the well-heeled Park Avenue diners in the Seagram Building's plush Four Seasons restaurant off their incredibly expensive lunches.

It is clearly brand new, anyway - the hotel is in the middle of a refurbishment and they actually installed this painting only this morning; yesterday when I arrived there was merely a blank wall. There are paintings all down the corridor leaning against the wall, outside the doors of rooms that have not yet been cleaned, waiting to be installed, and I can say for definite that none of them are as bad as this (most of them seem to be renderings of 100 Euro banknotes). I am clearly blessed.

A Homage to Catalonia

Two for the price of one, this time. These come from a rather bland modern hotel in Barcelona, at the unfashionable end of the Avenue Diagonal, with some building works going on in surrounding streets that had evidently breached a sewage pipe, as everything smelt of shit. Did this colour my view of the works on offer? You decide...

So this is Exhibit C - an abstract collage complete with frowny eye ¬_¬ that seems to be staring at you in disapproval. The rays coming out of the front of the eye remind me of the way we had to draw the observer in physics experiment write-ups at school.


To be honest, I didn't mind it as much as the one next to it, which we will call Exhibit D.

There's something of the Caves of Lascaux here, something of the Corrida, although it's evidently (?) a horse (well, stallion, I'm guessing... if you see what I mean) and not a bull, but WTF has happened to its front legs? Spain is notorious for its animal cruelty, and I'm not so sure that no horses were harmed in the making of this picture.

Again, the second of our works has been signed. It looks like ∏ R. A fan of geometry, no doubt.

Mr Gorbachev - tear down this painting!

Exhibit B is from Berlin. If the Paris picture planted the seed of an idea last year, this is the picture that, this February, crystallised it and made me decide to create the site. I spent an unhappy week at a conference in the south-eastern suburbs, near Tempelhof airport and the old Berlin Wall. The Estrel Centre is a grey and utterly charmless concrete edifice, with jobsworth staff and rooms so minimalist that they seem to have sprung fully formed from an Ikea catalogue, like that bit at the start of Fight Club where Edward Norton is reflecting on how his life is a worthless exercise in conformist consumerism. Being central Europe, all art seems to be Modernist, and the pictures on the wall of the hotel are no exception. My room had this:

Lovely, isn't it? The child's drawing of a bus, moon, brain/labyrinth/stop sign and giant pair of Marilyn Monroe lips are presumably trying to send some kind of message about Berlin - night life, public transport, women - we have it all! It is all lovingly rendered in wax crayon squiggles overlaid with a colour wash, like you used to do at junior school. Top marks for keeping inside the lines, though, meister.

Not only signed this time, but dated. 'Pisak '95'.  Perhaps Herr/Frau Pisak was infused by the optimistic spirit of the 90s, after the fall of the Wall, when everything seemed possible - even getting paid for a child's picture of a bus in crayon.